modifying successive beings, you must find an organism to which you can attribute life. Whatever that organism was, it was the commencement of organic life; for, when you go back of it in the series, you come to something that was not organic life, but was merely a collection of molecules or a product of aggregated molecules, that had a capacity to be developed into an animated organism under favorable conditions. "It is," says Mr. Spencer, "by the action of the successively higher forms on one another, joined with the action of environing conditions, that the highest forms are reached." Some one, then, of those highest forms, something that can be called an animal organism, some being endowed with life, was the commencement of organic life on the globe; and it is just as correct and necessary to speak of it as the "absolute" commencement as it is when we speak of Darwin's aquatic grub, or of the Mosaic account of the creation of the different animals by the hand and will of God. Neither Mr. Spencer nor any other man can construct a chain of animated existence back into the region of its non-existence without showing that it began to have an existence. He can say that the affirmation of universal evolution is in itself a negation of an absolute commencement of anything. And so it is theoretically. But this does not get over the difficulty. On his own explanation of the mode in which organisms have been evolved, there must have been a first organism, and in that first organism life began. So that I am not yet prepared to yield my criticism, or to yield my convictions to a writer who is so much carried away by his theory. KOSMICOS. But you will allow that the theory is perfect in itself; and why, then, do you say that he is carried away by it? You ought either to give up your criticism, or to show that there is a superior hypothesis by which to account for the origin of organisms, and one that is supported by stronger proofs and better reasoning. You have nothing to oppose to Mr. Spencer's explanation of the origin of organic life, excepting the fable which you find in the book of Genesis.